Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [332]
MICHELE TAFOYA:
I don’t feel that the playing field is completely level. I can only speak from the roles that I handle, which are primarily reporting, and that’s one aspect of it. I think that women are predominantly looked at as reporters. I think we have our share of anchors and so forth, but we’re predominantly reporters. We’re always thought of as quote-unquote “sideline reporters.” “Female sideline reporters.” I hear those terms an awful lot. So just by virtue of that, I don’t think the playing field is particularly level. However, I have never, ever, ever used my gender or my sex as any kind of excuse. I never had a chip about it. When I started in this business back in 1993, I told myself as I marched off to Charlotte, North Carolina, to work in sports talk radio that I was going to be a reporter. Not a “female reporter.” Just a reporter. Diane Sawyer. Barbara Walters. Women that are being allowed to age gracefully in their roles, for lack of a better term. I don’t see that happening in sports. I don’t see a sixty-year-old woman being able to continue on covering sports, because I just don’t think that idea goes over well with viewers and therefore with management. Now is that unacceptable? I don’t know. It is what it is, but it underscores just one more time that the playing field ain’t level, and you can have one guy doing sports who is bald and maybe twenty pounds overweight. If you had a woman who was deemed less attractive, she might not get those same roles that the more attractive women get. That makes it an unlevel playing field.
Hosting the 14th Annual ESPY Awards in 2006, Lance Armstrong looked out at the audience in Hollywood’s Kodak Theatre and said he was surprised to see Brokeback Mountain costar Jake Gyllenhaal sitting in the front row—having assumed from the movie that the actor “likes it in the rear.” Armstrong told other arguably tasteless jokes that night, but this one got the most attention—and the attention was certainly not in the form of lavish praise or even “ha ha, good one”(although the joke did get loud laughs from the audience that night—including from Gyllenhaal).
Most of the comments provoked by the joke had to do with disbelief that it wasn’t edited out of the tape before broadcast, since when given the chance to edit out questionable material, ESPN usually reaches for the scissors. Critics pointed out that ESPN’s own SportsCenter anchors would have been in big trouble if they’d told the same joke on that program, even one of the editions airing at a later hour than the ESPYs did. John Walsh had made practically a crusade out of keeping humor at the awards show positive and—to use his favorite adjective in this context—“celebratory.”
“When you’re trying to attract the best, most contemporary, and most talented people from the entertainment community, they have an expectation of being attached to a show that takes risks,” Walsh said in response to criticism, but his would not be the last word.
LANCE ARMSTRONG, ESPYs Host:
Well, I was honored that ESPN would be willing to take a risk on an athlete hosting the show. It was a bit weird to be taking jabs at some people in sport, but I think most appreciated that it was all in good fun. I was extremely nervous. It is easy to participate in a live sporting event because most of the time you don’t see the cameras or you are so focused on the race. But when that curtain went up, it was real. And you are feet away from your peers in sports.
You do the rehearsals and it seems funny, but you never know until you start going live and have to face that audience.
JOHN WALSH:
The sports guy in late night is Jimmy Kimmel. He did the ESPYs one year, and we hated him. He did a terrible job. He’s a nice guy, a big sports fan. So we hired him, and I said, “Jimmy, you understand, this is not late-night television, it’s not a nightclub. It’s a celebration